It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Banish the Should -- Notes from Yale Creek, 2013

Everything I love about the hour around dawn has coalesced.  The chill, silent breeze embraces the deck where I curl into a futon, glad for my sweatshirt and jeans.  A blank notebook, the first after a too-long hiatus, is propped against my knees.  A thump echoes behind my right shoulder.  The tree just missed my head.  I pick up the lumpy green apple, salute the tree and the rising sun peeking from behind the hill, and take a bite.  Clicking my pen, I begin to write.

The tree threw an apple at me, so I thanked it for my snack.  The lambs have awoken the hillside, bawling their cotton ball dreams to their mothers.  The cows respond with the bass line from downslope.  Light is peering between the hills across the valley.  Its bleary eyes chase a jet trail into the periwinkle sky.

We’re an early lot this morning, kids trickling out of tents and beds.  The occasional body is still cocooned in odd places, the couch, the deck, none in the bathtub, though.

Brand new notepad for dreaming, for letting my pen slide across the lines, straying into the unknown spaces.

The apple was tart and crisp-perfect – until I went too far and got a bitter mouthful of the wormy center.  I spat the metaphor into the bushes and chucked my gift from Newton after.

I have a headache born of a hard mattress and too little sleep.  The moon awoke me on its path; it barged into my window, a violent, beautiful intruder stabbing my eyes with a white knife.

Instruments are everywhere, guitars gossiping in the corners and spilling onto the couch, cellos and violins in their black suits by the hearth.  Here and there the oddball – the almost banjo made from a Sierra Nevada case (perhaps that’s what the guitars are criticizing in their living room klatch), a violin case cracked open in an arm chair, a bongo drum standing mute by the coffee table, Caitlin’s cello case, alone in electric blue glory in a sea of black nylon.

The writing meanders through the week at Yale Creek Farm, drifting down the hill to examine the hops climbing their poles, digging its toes into the mud of the pond with the tiny, translucent leeches, sitting at the edge of a mosquito-bitten evening, listening to campfire tunes drift from the odd conglomerate of cellos, violins and guitars who have magically formed an orchestra.

It is a week of fundamentals – the building of shelter (in the form of two straw/clay construction cabins), the preparation of food (for 30+ from produce gleaned and dug from the soil of the farm), and the gathering of community (through games and music and work).  My body is tired on this first morning back at home, arms and shoulders bear testimony to hours of mixing and packing of straw and clay, legs moaning gently about the hills they encountered.  Yet, the work was effortless, a form of love and play.

“Don’t should on yourself,” a friend tells us, in response to some comment about dishes or dinner prep.  Her blue eyes grin beneath black brows as she waits for us to process through the other “Sh--“ word that hits the ears first.  “Only do what brings you joy,” she finishes.

I have trouble with shoulds and with obligation and joy.  Should is a thief, stealing the joy from basic tasks, necessities.  I “should” make dinner.  I “should” put down the phone and chat with the kids.  I “should” do some laundry.  My shoulds have been particularly toxic and self-critical of late.

But, with clay beneath my fingernails, the sun on my shoulders, and the songs of strings drifting up from the pond, the shoulds are beaten back into a corner.  Anxiety, perfectionism, fear, and judgment can’t stand against the elemental nature of the moment.  A blister has formed and burst on the heel of my hand, worn there by the corner of the chunk of wood I use to pack the straw and clay mixture into the crevices of the cabin framework.  My muddy hand-prints mix with others on the shared mason jar of water one of the women has carried up the hill from the kitchen.  The water is still cool and fresh; we’ve left our fears of germs and the odd stray gnat behind in our communal thirst.

I meditate sometimes at home, on a cushion gazing into a candle flame, or eyes closed on the mosaic bench at the front of our house.  Yet, in those cultivated places, thoughts chase like amphetiminized squirrels through my brain.  In the basic acts of building, of chopping vegetables, of feeling my arms cut through the murky water of the pond, the brain centers into a deep stillness.

Thump.  Thump.  The feel of the stick ramming the straw and clay vibrates up my arm and pounds the blood inside my ears.  I swirl a sudsy sponge across the never-ending mountain of dishes in the sink.  With over 30 hungry and thirsty people, the chore is Sisyphean.  Slicing carrots into awkward sticks, joy wells inside me as a worry dashes through my head and is pushed out.  “This too,” I tell myself quietly, echoing the meditation phrase as I keep chopping.  “This too” and the should is gone.

Back home, it’s easy to feel the shoulds and self-judgments piling up.  The lists and worries started lining up at the back of my brain, demanding entry on the drive south.  I’m not quite sure how to keep them in their place.  ‘I should clean the algae from the water pitcher.’ ‘I should go for a run this morning.’

“Only do what brings you joy.”

The green scum on the paper towel, still smelling slightly of vinegar makes me smile as I rinse and fill the now clear filter pitcher.  Once I hit SAVE and upload this post, I’ll put on my running shoes.  Thinking of the feel of my feet lightly slapping the pavement, of the hard-earned strength of my legs gives me joy.  I find myself planning dinner tonight – not as an obligation, but as an act of love.

 

The Other Path

Have you ever noticed that the closer you get to something you really want – attaining a goal, buying a house, embarking on a new relationship, graduating from school – the more afraid, sad, and downright dissatisfied your mind becomes? 

What’s up with that?

On the one hand, you can see where you want to be; it’s right there, just at the end of the road.  And you’re rubbing your feet together in bed in excitement the way you did when you were a kid on Christmas Eve or before a trip to Disneyland or the day before the public pool opened.  But, on that other, sinister (left) hand, your brain is screaming things like “I can’t do this!” and “This sucks; I hate paperwork” and “I’m all alone.” 

Yep.  That goal, that shiny, haloed, glowing Nirvana is right there in front of you, just steps away, and your brain is turning you around, and forcing you off the road and onto the trail that leads from anxiety to self-loathing and despair.  One minute, you’re rejoicing in the warmth of your connections, the intensity of an emotional bond.  Seconds later, your brain says “Why did you say that?  That was really stupid.”  The brain then leaps off of the road you’ve so carefully paved and into the thickets of “They don’t really want you here.  No one wants you.”  From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a flounder into “You are going to die alone on an iceberg and even the seals won’t want your pathetic corpse.”

It seems deranged that the closer we are to some sort of achievement or happiness, the more likely our brain is to try to snatch that vision away and steer us into the darkness.  Certainly every social condition says that this train of thought is nothing short of demented.  All of our interactions with others, with our computers, our radios, our televisions tell us that in this mindset, we are completely alone. 

And there is nothing like believing you’re the only one so pathetically lost to really fuel that trek through the dark woods.

“Wow, your race is coming up fast.  You must really be excited!”

“No, actually, I’m scared shitless, and I can’t remember why I’m doing this anymore.”

“Oh that’s just nerves.  You’ve been training so hard.  You’re going to do great!”

“Pretty sure I’ll be hauled off by the clean-up wagon as they sweep the streets.  If I bother to go. But thanks.”

OR

“I can’t believe you’re graduating already.  You must be thrilled to be done!”

“Not really.  I think I’ll go back to bed.”

“Aren’t you excited about your new school/job/travel?”

“No.  Pretty sure I failed that last final, and not looking forward to sitting in the sun in a hot gown, but thanks.”

OR

“Ohmigod, congratulations!  You two are just so great together.  I have goosebumps just looking at you!”

“I’m feeling really lonely right now.”

“That’s just because he/she is away tonight.  You’ll be so happy tomorrow!”

“There’s a giant hole burrowing into my heart, and he/she is probably going to dump me anyway, but thanks.”

OR

“Congratulations on your new job!  How fabulous!”

“I think I should stay where I am.”

“Don’t be silly.  This is an amazing opportunity!  You can do so much there!”

“I’ll be canned in a week and a half.  Plus, I don’t like the hours.  But thanks.”

OR

“What a beautiful baby.  You must be so thrilled to be a mom.”

“Not really.  I’m leaking from places I didn’t even know I could leak, and I haven’t showered in three days or slept in seven.”

“Oh, the first week or two is always hard.  You’ll be such a terrific parent!”

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to leave the baby carrier on the car roof, and I’m not certain it’ll be an accident, but thanks.”

I’m going to go out on a vulnerability limb – yes, that’s me sliding along the branch, please put down the saw – and suggest that most people can relate to one or more of the above (purely hypothetical) dialogues.  We’ve all been there.  And we’ve all been the person with the superfluity of exclamation points as well as the person tacking on the obligatory, “but thanks.”

We haven’t learned comfort with our own darkness.  The deranged voice trying to steer us away from our shiny goal isn’t the enemy.  If we let it in, maybe even offer it a nice pillow, it will reveal itself to be, if not a friend, at least an ally.

That voice is our devil’s advocate, our fact checker, our bad cop.  It exists to make sure that we are, in fact, doing the thing that is right for us, that we have prepared, that we understand the risks of both failure and success.  But it has to shout to make itself heard over all of the cheerleaders.  So, like anyone with a sore throat who feels that the pom pom girls and drum majors have once again stolen the spotlight, it gets a little testy – and a lot strident.  Instead of saying, “Hey, maybe you want to slow this attachment thing down a bit; go for a walk or something,” it says “You suck at relationships; you’re going to trash this anyway, so you should just prepare to die alone.”  Rather than pointing out that you might want to make a contingency plan or develop some good self-talk for when you get tired in a race, it says “You haven’t run farther than 20 miles; you’re going to hit that mark and your legs will just stop working.  Don’t even bother thinking about 26.2; just prepare to fall over and die at 20.”

I make no secret about the fact that I adore writer/director Joss Whedon.  Only the tatters of my sanity and self-respect keep me from approaching crazed, stalker, fan girl status where he is concerned.  He gave a graduation speech at Wesleyan University in which he addresses this notion of our inner contradiction and embracing that duality.  I’ve embedded it below.  Watch it.  It’s amazing.

As I’m currently the rope in the tug-o-war between cheerleaders and inner doomsayer, I don’t have spectacular answers for handling this dichotomy.  However, I’ve learned one thing.  Fighting the voice is useless.  It will be heard.  You might as well sit back and listen.  Say to yourself: “I feel like a failure.  I feel sad.  I feel alone.” You can hear it.  You won’t die.  Because, here’s the thing; you do have to listen to the voice, but you don’t have to do anything about it.  You can feel like a loser and still go out and train.  You can feel sad, and still do the things that make you happy.  You can cry into your pillow with loneliness and still form increasingly close connections.  The voice doesn’t change who you are, it just helps tell you all of who you are.

If I come up with any other insights on this, I’ll let you know after my marathon in two weeks.  If I don’t die at the 20 mile mark, that is.

  

11 Weeks

Note: It isn't often that I share poetry publicly, so please be gentle.  This emerged from a "failed" long run yesterday in which I wound up with an incapacitating IT band strain and had to quit two miles short of my goal.  But the events started me thinking about the effects of time, not just on our bodies, but how we see ourselves and our challenges.

 

 

The first two miles pound out in creaking joints and calves of jelly.

Gratitude for the gift of a red light, stretching at the signal with the feigned impatience

of a real athlete

The old woman in the body sheds the imagined decades with the miles, each stride kicking off the dust of time.

By the time I cross from the downtown realm of the elderly, my chronological age and I are one again.

Sweat drips between my breasts, on my right, the apartment where my virginity and I parted ways – two decades ago, now.  Woman grown, wife, mother, my head turns and I see the girl holding naked hands with her lover on the brown couch, afraid to ask,

“What does this mean?”

She never asked, and the question is gone, answer blown off in the miles behind.

Over the freeway, decades falling away into light steps that blow across the asphalt pass with the frail feathers of almond and cherry.

Mile four and nearly twenty again – twenty, but for the two undergraduates sprinting by, knees reaching nearly to their upright breasts, feet kissing the ground like fairy metronomes.

The audiobook plugged into my cortex speaks of shame, compassion, and messages.  I dig from my brain thoughts of love for the nymphs leaving me with the blowing pollen and for my own body – stronger in its scars than that of the girl who never asked and never received.

Loss doesn’t care if we risk.  But, reward won’t come uninvited. 

Six miles and only bicycles and shadowy cows spreckle the landscape.  The unwelcome tension of a bladder pushed, prodded, stretched, and squashed by three pregnancies knocks against the present mind.

Tap.  Tap.  A bush over there. 

Too scanty

Tap.  Tap.  Trees?

Not shielded from the path.

Time and body converge.  The twenty year old would have risked a rupture.  I weigh the balance.

The British voice from my phone notes my slowing pace.  Judgmental bastard.  The female voice would have understood.  Phone app gent doesn’t get it.  He could just whip it out at that olive tree over there, relieve that tapping tension, and be on his merry old way, no one the wiser.

“12.2 minutes per mile.  Average pace 11 minutes 4 seconds per mile.”

Plummy prick.  Leave me alone.

Spring sky sits empty, cloud-free and bird unburdened.  They rustle and whistle from the olive trees and long grasses, crossing over the audiobook’s words:

Shame

Resilience

Trap

Connection

Vulnerability

Trust

Can one feel shame about being ashamed?  The pressure beneath the belt of my waist-pack leads me off the path of philosophy and behind a clump of fallen branches and low-hanging trees.

Crouching knees, bare ass, and fears of wet socks trump the esoteric.

A car shoots past, then a male cyclist.

I pretend to tie my shoe and make myself invisible.  A grey haired woman on a bicycle looks my way a just long enough for the rays of judgment to scorch my hair and shoulders.  I think the tree above me is a fig – leaves not yet unfurled.

I pull my underwear and shorts about me as I stand – one smooth motion, I think.  Until the invisible key locks my right knee.

Lurch.  Stagger.  Adjust waistbands in time for the next bicycle wheel to crest the hill.  I flex my leg a few times.  Ten miles.  Okay, I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge, says the part of the brain tracking the marathon course map.  11 weeks.

I try to feel salt winds on my face but have to skip down onto the gravel shoulder as a car sails round the bend.

The 42 year old knee doesn’t like this game of chicken.  Tendons that had adjusted to the stretch and contract of an even pace are rebelling against the break, the squat, and the pavement chopped like toffee.

Mother shame, says the audiobook.  Caregiver shame.  Body image shame.

Is there shame in a middle-aged woman, slogging alone down a country road?

“Oh, that’s why you have such killer legs,” said a friend meeting me around the bend of a trail.

I have killer legs, I tell them, as the knee screams and the ankle whines in sympathy.  Not even 11 miles.

The knee doesn’t care.  We compromise.  You can walk to the next bend, I say.

I cheat, picking up the pace before the road curves away.  Small betrayals don’t go unnoticed.  Unkept promises return until fulfilled.

12 miles – Off the bridge, into Sea Cliff.  Rolling hills, says my mind to the flat fields and orchards around me.

Invisible gremlins are at work on my knee with an ice-pick.  Stop.

Can’t stop.  Not even half way.

Walk.

Walking.  A truck passes.  A minivan with pressed children’s faces.  An elderly sedan.

How stupid you look, trudging along the crumbled edge of the road – blatantly not running in your fluorescent gear and purple shoes.

That is the voice of shame – not from magazines or enemies, but from the imagined places where whispers of past follies hide.

Fingers twitch at the microphone of my headset.  So easy to call.  My husband would ride up, a knight upon a silver minivan.

Follow the road.  It’s the miles that count.

Pace: 17 minutes per mile.  Average pace: 12 minutes 24 seconds.

It’s the miles.  Just do the miles.  It doesn’t matter how fast.

The run shuffles off into the lurching jog of a zombie with places to go.  Half a mile, I tell myself.  I manage about 200 yards.

Breath floats in and out with the ease of the whispering dewy grasses.  Lungs and left leg could go for miles.

Sinister persists.  I am betrayed by the right.

13 miles

14

Walking now, I’ll run up the overpass, I think.

Four strides and a whimper.  Toy cars buzz below.  Downhill will be better.

Fire and ice shoot across my knee.  The wrinkled, square face of the balding man pedaling up the hill sees the weakness.  His gnarled legs push past me in silent disdain.

Fingers press the microphone. 

“I’m not going to make it the full way.  Can you get me at the AM/PM when you come through?”  Shadows hide behind the question.  Bibbed runners pass in my head, dreaded letters paint in ghost ink next to my name in the marathon lists

D

N

F

Did. Not. Finish.

Purple vetch laces the hillside at our feet.  Girls cluster like flowers blowing at the summit’s edge.  One looks at my clothes and laughs, “Did you run here?”

“Well.  Most of the way.  But my knee gave out.”

Something passes below the laugh.  “Oh.  I thought you were going to say ‘Just kidding.’ You really ran?”

We stand at the top of the spring world.  Knee flexes.  “Yes, but I overdid it a bit today.  I think the answer is not to be 42.”

They laugh as only 13 can, free of the imaginary ailments of middle age – aches, and rent, and taxes.

“She’s training for a marathon,” my daughter tells her friends.

Goats dance on a distant hill.  A toddler staggers with purpose among the purple.

“Today didn’t work, but I can do it.  I have 11 weeks.”

 

 

 

8th Grade Lessons

Since winter break dissolved into the new year, our lives have been very 8th-grade-centric.  With the start of basketball season started, and Saturdays have taken place in a gym in Fair Oaks.  Fiction writing, play practice, a snow trip, a dance, the yearbook, raffle ticket sales – events fly at us like confetti shot from a cannon with “The Final Year” emblazoned on the barrel.
Perhaps inevitably, I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the past two months with this class, beginning with teaching a couple of fiction lessons, culminating most recently in a field trip and carpools to various events.  I was supposed to help teach these adolescents how to write pretend lives, but instead they reminded me how to live.
This refresher course on loving, laughing, learning, and letting go has come at a good time for me, so I thought I’d pass it along.  Here you go – life lessons brought to you by the Davis Waldorf School eighth grade.
1.    Be yourself (Unless you can speak in a bad British accent; then do that.  Always)—Adolescents are magpies or sheep, mimics driven by imitation and peer pressure, right?  What if I showed you a group of teenagers who know that they come in all shapes and sizes, who know that one person’s quirk is also that person’s strength, who wear brightly colored skinny jeans, or vests and ties, who push the corners and seams of the dress code to find their own style?  What if I showed you teenaged boys waltzing together or holding hands with giant grins?  What if I showed you a quiet girl doing a Cockney accent in the back of a minivan on the way to a ball?
2.    If plan A won’t work, move to plan B, or, ditch the plan and grab a sled.  On the second morning of the snow trip, the planned sculpture contest unraveled as the perfect snow packing conditions of the day before shifted into crumbly powder.  The kids barely paused.  The teams of three flowed apart, grabbed shovels and began to “build snow caves.”  When this plan proved improbable due to a lack of snow depth and the aforementioned crumbling factor, the cave diggers became toboggan run designers.  When the run turned out to be more of a toboggan crawl, they shrugged, grabbed sleds, and headed up the mountain.
3.    Take the shot that counts.  From basketball to music, from tests to plays, these kids know that the score isn’t counted in practice, rehearsal, or study period.  They may miss a layup or free-throw in practice with a shrug or a grin, flub lines or goof off during dress rehearsal, but when it’s game time, they’ll make the 3-pointer or go down trying, and they’ll be encore-worthy perfect when the curtain goes up.
4.    Acknowledge the awkwardness.  A couple of weekends ago, we held a “fiction party” for the 8th grade at my house.  Even as I was buying pizza and chips, I had the maternal jitters.  “Do you think they’ll have fun, or is this just stupid,” I asked Caitlin more than once.  I worried that the kids would feel obligated to come, and that it would be a wasted Sunday afternoon for them.  Sure enough, as they arrived, our tiny kitchen filled with hovering teenagers.  My mind spun circles generating “fix-it” plans, but my internal writer said, “This is a fiction party; let’s see how the scene plays out.”
Finally, one girl gave a nervous giggle.  “Well, this is awkward.”
As anyone who knows this class could have predicted, this was the cue for everyone to laugh and grab pizza and soda.  Before long, the mood had shifted from freaky ‘what are we all doing here anyway’ awkwardness to a party.  (See below.)
5.    Life is a party.  If it isn’t, you’re probably doing it wrong.  I’ve yet to see a work day, school day, game, or event that this class didn’t turn into a party.  They spend a lot of time together; they know each other’s quirks; and every gathering is really just an excuse to enjoy that bond.  I’m reasonably certain you could line them up at the DMV and after about ten minutes, the lobby would look like a dance club.
6.    You don’t always have to like each other, but families support one another.  This class isn’t a class.  They are a family.  Like siblings, they bicker and badger, but they always, always have each other’s backs.  One weekend, the boys and girls basketball teams had games in close time proximity.  Many of the girls showed up early to support the boys, and the boys stuck around to cheer and advise the girls.  It was as though an entire coaching squad had manifested in one section of the bleachers.  No matter how annoying they find each other’s quirks, they cheered every play by every player.
During the final day of the basketball tournament, the girls battled for third place and lost.  They had given it everything they had – one girl even playing with a fever – but it wasn’t enough.  These are 13 and 14 year old girls.  They could have sulked, gone home to cry, and no one would have blamed them.  Instead, two hours later, the loudest voices from the stands came from those girls, chanting in unison and cheering their male classmates to the tournament championship.
7.    Sometimes common sense is overrated. You don’t know it won’t work unless you try.  Every adult standing on the hill cringed.  It was like one of those nightmares that happen in slow motion.  You know how it will end, but you can’t move fast enough to stop it. 
Two boys, one snow tube, one hill.  What could go wrong?  Well, nothing, unless, the boys in question decide that the best way down the hill is not the middle of the run; after all, that’s already been done, but rather along the edge of the hill, right where it tips into trees, bushes, and a mild precipice.  Yeah, that should work.
The run ended as any of the adults could have predicted.  I had just enough time to think, “At least we made them wear helmets” before the tube slid off the edge and two rather surprised teens became tangled in the bare branches of a tree.
This sort of experimentation may not seem like a great life lesson – or even conducive to long life – but I’ve watched those same boys transform cans of spray paint, an old bedstead, a saw, and raw energy into props for a spooky Halloween garden.  Hang around them long enough and you will hear “What if we…”  It’s hard not to wonder what could happen in the world if more people said those words and then followed through.
8.    Be a surprise.  They only think they know you.  We all carry our own surprises and inconsistencies, yet we cling to the notion that we “know” those close to us.  Watching this class, though, I’ve seen: the least athletic kid go for and make a layup in basketball; one of the most pop-culture-engaged kids express the most conservative views; quiet girls belt out songs that would make your average American Idol contestant green with envy; and my practical daughter don an evil grin along with a party dress, while wondering if she can confuse the boys.
9.    Stand up for what you believe.  No one else is going to do it for you.  Civics is embedded in the 8th grade curriculum, and this class has taken the lessons to heart.  Their teacher commented to me that he’s been able to get through more material with them in previous years, but this year they want to debate and discuss everything – and he’s glad to see them do it.
During the “fiction party” at our house, I imitated a fly on the wall, tucked behind a bookcase, while they discussed the occupation of one of the characters in the show we were screening.  (She’s a high-level courtesan.)  I weighed the merits of jumping in with some pompous adult wisdom, but decided to watch the debate unfold.  Several of the kids were morally shocked, others argued that there was nothing wrong with her profession within the social context of the series, and a couple of mildly misogynistic comments were shot down as quickly as they appeared.
In the end, my input wouldn’t have mattered.  It didn’t matter who was right or wrong; what mattered is that they could work out how to express and defend their opinions against the toughest audience in the world – their peers.
10.    You’re going to have to say goodbye.  Spend as much time together as possible.  The last times are piling up.  They’ve had their last snow trip together as a class; the curtain has come down on their last play; they’ve played their last basketball games together as teams.  There are still plenty of landmarks, big and small, to come over the next few months, but time is rolling them inexorably toward June.  These kids are tight, but after graduation, it won’t be the same.  They’ll move on to different Junior High and High School campuses for ninth grade.  They’ll form new bonds of friendship and conflict.  Time and distance will float them gradually apart.
Faced with separation, adults often prepare emotionally for the inevitable by clinging to the past, or, more commonly, by distancing ourselves in advance.  We seem sometimes to view wholehearted involvement in ephemeral relationships as a wasted investment.
This class of 2013 has shown something different in this last half of their final year together.  They are facing the end in their own way, with class, style, and a sense that they are “all in.”
The gym was being mopped, clusters of parents stood chatting while younger siblings practiced dribbling and half-hearted shots at a hoop far above their heads.  The trophy had been awarded, medals ringed the necks of the boys’ team, and the players hugged, mugged for photos, laughed, passed the trophy around, and basked – girls and boys alike – in being part of school history.  The boys won it, but for the girls, it seemed like their victory, too – the first championship trophy earned by a team from the school. 
Finally, a weary voice raised above the buzz.  We turned to see the senior referee with the microphone.  “We need to clear out the gym.”
It was time to go home.

 

 

Show and Tell: Thoughts on writing, teaching, and learning

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov

What shall I show you?   Shall I show you the woman, staring at a computer screen, embedded in a sea of interview notes?  Shall I show you the blank face of the monitor, staring back at her?  Shall I show you instead young faces, many dotted with the badges of adolescence, some tan, some freckled, chattering and grinning?  Shall I show you the dynamics of character and plot, played out as the teens pass through their morning exercises in movement and dance?  Shall I show you the boy, in lotus position, grinning as his classmates count out crunches in grunts all around him?  Shall I show you the couple, tracing the steps of the salsa, lips murmuring the count while their worried eyes watch their feet and the room?  Shall I show you another couple, hips swaying, spinning with all the bold color of the dance?  Or shall I show you the group that has given up on the salsa, and instead clusters at the back of the room, voices rising over the music, like magpies on a wire?

When I began writing professionally, I saw the occasional essay bemoaning the ease with which writing ceases to be fun once a paycheck is involved.  Intellectually, I knew that obligation often robs us of our joy.  But, I had waited so long to write; I love writing; it would (yes, you can complete the sentence) never happen to me.

Fortunately (from the perspective of my bank account), this has been an obligation-heavy few months.  Reality and I have always had a somewhat uneasy co-existence.  I earn my living through fact, yet my brain creates stories from nearly every experience.  But, since the world has been spectacularly reluctant to feed me for flights of fancy, my bread, butter, and magic beans come from sorting through piles of cold, unyielding evidence.

Caitlin prefers to work with facts.  She will happily devour the literary contents of someone else’s imagination, but she prefers the work generated from her own hand to have its feet solidly planted in consistency and logic.  The uncertainty of a blank page unsettles her.

Her class’s return to 8^th grade following winter break commenced with a block on creative writing – short stories, specifically.  The timing was impeccable.  My imagination had been feeling the cold hand of winter; words were looking less and less friendly by the day.  On a whim, one morning, I emailed Caitlin’s teacher to ask if there was any way I could help with the writing block.

Despite the aforementioned lack of editorial enthusiasm regarding my fiction, I still believe in my stories.  Sure, the catty critic inside my head jabbed me with a couple of needles – What can someone who can’t even get her own stories published teach about fiction – but, if I were in the habit of listening to her, I’d have been found, decaying in the fetal position under a blanket years ago.

The teacher invited me into the classroom last week to teach a couple of lessons on the elements of fiction.  Day One covered character, plot, and conflict.  I had typed out my lesson days in advance, with lots of writerly quotations and excerpts from my own work.  But, arriving early on Wednesday morning, I accompanied the class over to the multipurpose room for their morning movement.  In addition to calisthenics, the class is practicing ballroom dancing in preparation for the ‘big dance’ of their 8^th grade year, the Winter Ball.

Character, plot, and even conflict played out in front of me.  Each kid’s efforts, movement, or lack thereof described his or her personality exactly.  Conflicts, internal and external, played out subtly in the selection of dance partners, in the shifting and changing of action on the dance floor.  They were teaching me my own lesson as I watched.

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

No, those words were not spoken by an elderly politician complaining about texting, butt-hanging jeans, and the obesity epidemic.  Socrates said them somewhere around 400 B.C.

I’ve seen rude and/or apathetic teens, but I’ve also encountered more than a reasonable share of rude, lazy, apathetic, and intellectually-stunted adults.  I’ve never bought into the theory that the upcoming generation shows the incipient demise of society.  But, even if I had bought into the generational trope, Caitlin’s class would have shaken that conviction.

Okay, yes, there is a basket for cell phones and electronics in the classroom, and it seems to get fuller by the month.  Yes, these kids tease and joke with teachers and parents.  They chatter instead of, and during exercise, and well, I suspect that Socrates take on food derived from watching a horde of adolescents descend upon the early version of a pepperoni pizza like locusts.

However, if their teacher is tyrannized, he hides it well.  The class did indeed stand as I was introduced (despite the fact that many of them have known me since they were seven or eight.) And forget the stereotype of the bored, rude teen.

For every question I asked or point I made, hands flew up and the room buzzed.  Sure, I had to bring them back from the neverland of chatter, but they weren’t talking about shopping or game scores.  The chatter was more along the lines of “Oh, that’s like in such-and-such book.” “Oh!  Did you see XXXX movie, where the guy did YYYY?  That was totally man vs. himself.”

I don’t know for sure what the kids took away from my couple of mornings with them.  I hope that, if nothing else, something will have seeped into their heads that causes them to look at their books, movies, and video games with new eyes.  Maybe some of them will decide that this story thing is fun.  Maybe some will learn that if you get stuck when writing, you can just blow up a goat.  Maybe they were bored out of their skulls but too polite to show me.

But I know what I learned from them.  I took away memories such as a young man saying, with no trace of self-consciousness, “That’s like in Sense and Sensibility” when we talked about mis-direction.  I will remember the almost unanimous looks of confusion when I stated during a discussion of dialogue that they speak differently to their best friends than to classmates with whom they might not be as close.  “What do you mean?” they asked.  “We’re all close.”

They helped me remember why I write.  I write to better understand my own story.  I write to show myself the glint of light on broken glass, and to remind myself that others see it too.

The Pause

“The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.” –Dr Seuss, Oh the Places You’ll Go!

My kids’ school curriculum has pauses built into the day; the teachers talk about the rhythm of in-breathing and out-breathing.  The space between the notes makes the music.  Negative space balances the picture.  The key points of a dialogue lie between the words.

I know these things.  I know them, but I am not good with the pause, with the negative space, with waiting.  I come from a long line of mostly Anglo-Saxon over-achievers.  My method is less to serve by standing and waiting than it is to power through with a stiff upper lip or work around with cheery flexibility.

Sometimes the universe has other plans.

I recently hit not just a pause, but a full stop, in an interaction.  No work-around.  No fix.  Not even much closure.  Stopped.  Over.  Done.

Did I mention that I’m not comfortable with powerlessness?

Ok, I said to myself, this is obviously here for a reason, just like any other setback or stressor in my life.  It’s here to show me how strong I am, to test me.  We experience pain or loss in order to know who we are, right?  I don’t pause.  I reframe.  Friendships, jobs, house, car, article or book rejection – it isn’t a loss; it’s an opportunity.  There’s a phoenix tattooed on the back of my shoulder for a reason.  I am an optimist; we pull glory from the flames and ashes.

So, in the last month or two, I have pulled out all of the stops in my attempt to show the world exactly how strong I can be.  By “the world,” I mean myself, of course.  Volunteering at the school?  Absolutely.  What do you need?  I’m there.  A co-worker needs something edited?  Sure.  I’ll put my project aside and do that right now.  Half-marathon in the rain with a cold?  No problem.  Personal best time.  A magazine client needs a feature article with a less-than two week deadline that overlaps with a conference?  Piece of cake.  I’m their girl.  In the meantime, I’ll read articles on acceptance and fully experiencing the present. 

Just let me make the present as busy as possible.

Somewhere between the rainy half marathon and Thanksgiving, things started to break down a little.  The cold didn’t seem too bad, and it had mostly resolved by the week after Thanksgiving.  The cold sores that erupted around the time of my rush-article writing could perhaps have been a clue, a warning flag on the track, if you will.  The cough that kicked in the night before we needed to pack up the kids and car to head for Anaheim for a combined conference (me) and Disneyland (Mike and the kids) trip, should probably have told me to at least slow down.

I did slow down.  We only went to Disneyland for a couple of hours the evening that we arrived.  I only ran 2.5 miles on the treadmill the next morning.  Oh, and lifted some weights.  By midway through the conference, my cough was bad enough that I had to walk out of the middle of a talk on recurrent airway obstruction in horses – not ironic at all.  I backed off to two miles on the treadmill that morning.

By the time we were heading home, Mike wound up driving both halves of the trip since I couldn’t do anything without coughing until I was blind.  The holiday party for my job began two hours after we arrived home.  We went.

I went to work the next day, but I’d begun to recognize a problem.  I called my doctor’s office for an appointment, not because my chest hurt when I tried to breathe, or because I felt like crap.  No, I called because I couldn’t run, and it was interfering with my marathon training schedule.  Yes, somewhere in all of that rushing around the “waiting place,” I had registered for the San Francisco marathon in June.

I did take the weekend off.  Well, except for the few hours spent helping my boss edit a speech and running errands on Sunday, that is.

By yesterday (Monday), I was feeling “better,” but I decided to work from home, to rest.  That may have been the first intelligent choice I’ve made in weeks.  But, my body decided that it was too little, too late.  As I was chatting with a friend at the school between pick up times for Sierra and Aidan, it started.  The bright sunlight began to waver between the bare branches of the trees.  I looked toward the shaded buildings – circles shimmered on the yellow walls.  I rummaged through my purse, but naturally, my pills were in my other bag.

Migraine.  My body’s personal stop sign.

There is no multi-tasking through a migraine, at least not for me.  There is nothing but a dark room, a pillow, and the wait.  Waiting for sleep to come.  Waiting for the pain to go.  Waiting.

You can take medication to make the migraine go away sooner, to reduce the length of the inevitable hangover, but there is no escape.  I can’t busy my way out of a migraine.  I can’t read or write – light stabs through my retina and straight into my brain.  Music or books on tape are out.  Sound makes me want to vomit.  A migraine leaves me alone in the dark, with only my own thoughts for company.

Guess what.  That is where we really find ourselves.  Where we learn who we are, how strong we are.  We don’t learn what we can handle when we are rushing around, when we’re bursting with physical, mental, and emotional fitness.  We find ourselves in the broken places, in the dark, with our heads splitting open and leaking tears into our pillows.

Yes, I have articles to write, and marathon training to do.  But I also have healing to do.  The universe only has to whack me over the head so many times before I finally get it.  I’ll take today as a sick day, rest my body and mind, and embrace my time in the waiting place.  I won’t be here forever.  I have things to do.

 

Why I run

“May the wind be at your back,” a friend posted to my Facebook wall when I commented on my half-marathon for the weekend.  As I passed our kids’ school, somewhere around mile 9, in the pelting rain, the allusion to a song sung at the closing of each school year seemed cruelly ironic.

May troubles be less

And blessings be more

And nothing but happiness come to your door.

May you have luck wherever you go

Your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.

May wind be at your back

And sun be overhead

May friends be at your side

Wherever you are led.

The wind, rather than being at my back, had been slapping me in the face with pelting rain for the past mile or two, so likewise, the sun was decidedly not overhead.  As for friends, well, my family was sick, and most folks with any sense were inside, probably with books, blankets, and hot chocolate.  But, as I passed the red walls of the schoolyard, and turned down a side-street and blessedly out of the wind, I realized that my blessings are indeed more, and that this run was reinforcing my awareness of them.

“You can’t run away from trouble.  There ain’t no place that far.” – Uncle Remus

You can’t run from your past – from your actions, choices, or emotions.  But, you can run to understand your past, and to understand that like each stride, every choice you’ve already made is done.  Yesterday’s race took me from downtown Davis onto the university campus, past the dorm I lived in my freshman year – where I had my first kiss, my first broken heart, my first D on a test, and where, years after my residence there, I would meet my husband at a party in my old room.

The girl who lived in that room is gone.  Her choices are made, her tests are taken.  She packed up her boxes at the end of the year and left the room to a full generation’s worth of new freshmen.  Yet, without her choices, without her pains, joys, and growth, the woman that I am would never have passed her dorm on a rainy Saturday 24 years later.

We ran past the apartments where I lived my junior and senior years of college.  In that apartment, I learned to co-exist in a group other than my family, I experienced rejection and acceptance, I lost my virginity, and gained confidence.  I don’t live there anymore.  I am not that young woman either.  She looked at the future and saw a blank slate of dreams and terrifying facelessness.  I see the faces of loved ones in every leaf and raindrop, and I know that reality and dreams are equally ephemeral.

We ran through Village Homes, where several friends live, past the lawn of the commons where the children of friends have had their 8^th grade graduation ceremonies.  My brain read the street signs, straight from Middle Earth, “Bombadil” “Oakenshield.”  I’ve never been able to stand Tolkien, but my husband and kids are Lord of the Rings fanatics.  But, even evenings spent watching the movies, or listening to my kids debate the finer points of the stories are, in a way, gone.  More are likely to come, as I am likely to take more strides on many more runs.  But, each footprint, each laugh, each argument lies behind us.

I run to get stronger.

Down a slope, up a hill.  Every mile I run is a mile I couldn’t have managed five years ago.  Every drive of my legs is a step further than I once thought I could take.

As a confirmed nerd, I never really connected physical fitness with mental or emotional strength.  After all, jocks are dumb, right?  Insensitive.  I’ll admit it; I bought the stereotypes for longer than I care to acknowledge. I married a former jock, who is quite literally a genius (and more sensitive than he would willingly admit.)  I’ve known plenty of fit, astute people.  But I didn’t get it.  Didn’t get that there could be a coordination between the body and the brain, or the heart.

Mens sana en corpore sano, said the Romans.  A sound mind in a sound body. 

When I run faster or farther than I have before, when I sprint a steeper hill, or run into a bitter north wind without walking, I remember that I can do more than I thought.  If I can run one mile, I can run two.

If I can face losing a pet, I can accept the loss of a friend.  If I can handle a tiff with my husband, I can take my children yelling “I hate you!”  If I can brave a run before dawn, I can call an intimidating source for an interview.  If I can run three miles in ten minutes less than I could a few years ago, I can meet my deadlines.  If I can lace up my running shoes and hit the pavement when my body wants to crawl back under the covers, I can create something beautiful even when my mind wants to crawl into a drink or a pint of ice cream. If I can cross the overpass above the freeway that sent me into panic attacks a year ago, I can handle professional scrutiny or brave sending my work out for rejection. If I can run past aching muscles, I can work, live, love, and laugh through an aching heart.

There’s no such thing as a bad run.

It may feel like I’m slogging through oatmeal.  I may have gotten cramps or a migraine two miles in and had to walk for the day.  I may not have met my goal for time or distance.  I may be bored.  I may hate every minute.  The endorphins may have gone to find another home that day.  But, even the “bad” runs, the off days, the days when I want to indulge my inner self (who is a 400 lb, borderline-alcoholic recluse with some serious control issues), even those runs make me stronger.  I didn’t stay on the couch.  I built some muscle fiber, some aerobic capacity, burned some calories, remodeled some bone, saw some trees, birds, and sky.  Not meeting my goal doesn’t negate the value of the run.

I may not like every experience of a given day, week, month, or year.  I may wish that any or all of it could be different, that the problems would magically resolve.  I don’t like loss, rejection, failure, chaos, or stress any more than I like sore muscles, blisters, stitches in my side, nausea, aching knees, or sciatica.  But, just as the latter things are the inevitable accompaniments to the benefits of running, the former pains go hand-in-hand with the joys of life.  Sore legs remind me that I am building muscle.  Sorrow, anger, and even regret remind me that I am building strength.

I run to feel better about myself.

Yep, I’m vain.  I am a stronger, braver, kinder, more patient person when I feel good about myself.  And, though it may be shallow, I feel better when I look better.  I read a gem online a while ago.  It was one of those pithy eCards on someone’s page.  “I don’t exercise to be healthy.  I exercise to look sexy as f—k. Naked.”

Yep, you’d better believe I repeat that one to myself when the running gets hard.  It may be lofty to exercise for one’s health, or mental balance, or as an example to one’s children, but when you hit that last couple of miles, and everything burns, and you really only want to either vomit or die – whichever the body is willing to do first – loftiness is of little use.  When things really get tough, the world narrows down to a very tight core.  We call it selfishness, and maybe it is.  But, it is the place of survival, a place of hardness and resolve.  In that place, yeah, you’d better believe it – I tell myself that I exercise to look sexy as f—k.  Naked.

If the base goals help us to get past the bottom, to come out again into the light and into a higher purpose, well, why not?  We are animals, and for survival we need food, water, air, and sex.  Philosophy comes once those needs are met.

Mount Everest

That is the answer to so many things in our house.  The translation is “because I can” or “because it’s there.”  I run because I can.  I have legs, and my legs are strong.  My health is good.  My joints are decent.  I run because I am blessed with a body that is capable of running – maybe not fast, maybe not beautifully, maybe not far.  I will never be an elite athlete, but I can.

I run to know who I am.

Ultimately, this is the answer, the one that is hard to explain when friends and family give me incredulous looks as I babble excitedly about signing up for a new race, or how I’m looking forward to my weekend long run.  They want to know why something uncomfortable, taxing, and that most folks regard as a chore is fun to me.

Here is my answer.  In each breath, in each stride, with each slap of my shoe on the ground, I am me.  I exist in that moment.  Every other stride, every other word, every other choice is behind me.  The things I fear, the things I hope for, the next stride haven’t happened yet.  I don’t know if I will finish the race. I don’t know if I will publish a book or an article.  I don’t know if my children will succeed.  I don’t know how I will live.  But, I know the stride that I take in that moment.  When I run, I am not accountable to anyone other than me. I can’t be anywhere other than in my body.  I can’t be anyone other than myself.

When I run, I know what I can do.  I know where I am.  When I run, I know myself.

 

 

 

The Naked Self

Listening to music sung by a friend this morning started me thinking about creativity.  As children, unless we’re squashed mentally and emotionally, creativity comes naturally.  It’s like running around naked.  Rocks are jewels, the world is a canvas, every rhyming word is fodder for a song, and shirts, pants, and underwear are optional.

Yet, as we grow older, fall from Eden, and find the shame in our nakedness, we also begin to clothe our creativity.  We cover it in structure, form, criticism, and conformity.  Think back through adulthood – when was the last time you (independent of a small child) broke out that cool box of 64 Crayolas?  You know, the one with the sharpener in the back.  When did you last make up a song to hum to yourself, even though you can’t carry a tune?  When did you last grab a pencil and paper and just scrawl whatever your hand wanted – words, pictures, doodles, obscene cartoons?

Creativity gets compartmentalized, assigned to art class, music lessons, writing seminars, or the theater.  In our adult world, we assume that creativity is given only to “artists.”  How often have you said, “I’m just not creative,” or “I wish I were a creative person so that I could do that.”?  I know I’ve heard it more times than I can count.  Yet, assuming that creativity is limited only to those we classify as artists or eccentrics is akin to deciding that only movie stars, nude models, and strippers have bodies.

I don’t think it is a coincidence, this simultaneous constriction and repression of our creative and physical selves.  Creativity is a nakedness of the soul.  We can filter how we present ourselves in our everyday lives, put on social costumes, but when we are truly creative, we can no longer hide the things that distinguish us from others.  When we create and share our creations, we are totally exposed – everything that we are is out there for the world to see and to judge.

That’s where the damage lies in this concealment and conformity that we impose upon our creative souls and upon our bodies.  We fear judgment and we clothe ourselves in it.  And, in doing so, we teach the next generation to loathe both their bodies and their individuality.  Think back – when have you heard these: “Put on some clothes; you’re too old to run around the house in your underwear.”  “That’s a pretty picture, but the sky is blue, not orange.” How many of us have been taught to color inside the lines, or grew up listening to the adults in our lives criticize their own bodies and those of others?

My own upbringing was wonderfully supportive of creativity.  I had more paints, crayons, and modeling clay than any 50 children could want.  Music lessons, journals, easels, you name it.  Comfort with one’s own body was another story.  Most of my ancestors hail from the British Isles.  When your spiritual ancestors are Knox and Calvin, appreciation of the human form isn’t exactly hard-wired into the familial structure.

As I reached adulthood, I made a few abortive attempts to become comfortable in my body, but those quickly fell victim to a combination of insecurity, fashion magazines, and motherhood.  I learned to clothe my body in ways that expressed whoever I was being at the time – to hide any bulges, knobby knees, to minimize my linebacker shoulders.  And, as I reached adulthood, as I fell into the roles of professional and mother, I put away my creativity.  Any outbursts of crafting were carefully and appropriately directed toward projects for the home or my children.  Grownups don’t draw and paint – unless they are artists.  They don’t play instruments – unless they are musicians.  They don’t write – unless they are authors.  Grownups don’t reveal their souls or their bodies.  They wrap themselves in convention, in small talk, in business suits, in politics, in book clubs.

In 2008, in the downslope of my 30s, I realized something.  I can’t be a grownup.  Covering up and burying the parts of myself that make me unique was killing me.  I broke out a journal.  I began to write and then to blog.  I got my easel and oil paints down from the attic. And, about the time I began this blog and first submitted essays for national consumption, I began to run.  I decided to enjoy my body.  To clothe it in ways that make me happy.  And the more I learned to appreciate my body and to become comfortable in it, the more my creative side thrived.

Self-revelation is terrifying and exhilarating.  And yet, I can’t help wondering if we make too big a deal about it.  What are we hiding, exactly?  When we refuse to paint because “I’m not artistic,” or we decline to sing along for fear that someone will hear us and judge, when we agonize in a dressing room and finally put that gorgeous bikini back on the rack, what are we saying about our humanity?  What are we telling ourselves and the world about our gifts, our potential?  And how much are we denying others permission to share of themselves?

One of my proudest moments as a mother came a couple of weeks ago.  I have a 13 year old daughter.  My family history is not rife with examples of secure, confident, healthy adolescence.  I had assumed anxiety, body issues, and insecurity to be part of the territory.  So, it was with great joy one evening during family banter that I heard these words come out of my daughter’s mouth.  “I like my body.”

I wanted to bronze that sentence and give it to her and to every other person on the planet as a gift.  When we like our bodies, when we like ourselves, when we like the creative impulses, the quirks, and the out-of-the-box-ness that make us unique, we are capable of greatness.

We all have the same number of chromosomes. And within those chromosomes we have an amazing array of unique genetic coding.  We are all alike, and we are all absolutely unique.

Nakedness, of body or of soul, takes tremendous courage.  And yet, perhaps, if more of us practiced revealing ourselves, sharing ourselves, less courage would be needed.

So, here you go, I’ll take the plunge.  Not perfect, not a celebrity, not an artist, not “special” – just human.

Last Day Lessons

Today is the last day of school for my kids.  At the closing ceremonies today, Caitlin will stand with her class and sit down as an 8^th grader; Aidan will stand with his and take his seat as part of the new 5^th grade; Sierra will hand a red rose to her 8^th grade buddy, just as her buddy welcomed her at the beginning of the year, and will sit down as a second grader to watch “the buddies” leave the school the same way they entered in 1^st grade – under an arch of flowers.

There is a beautiful symmetry to the closing ceremonies, tradition and predictability.  The ceremony doesn’t so much provide false security and safety as it supports and embraces all that has been learned and all that is still unknown.

May troubles be less

And blessings be more,

And nothing but happiness come to your door.

And may you have luck

Wherever you go

Your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.

 

May wind be at your back

And sun be overhead

May friends be at your side

Wherever you are led.

 

We sing this song at closing every year – parents, kids, faculty, and staff.  The words blend farewell, see-you-later, and I’ll-always-be-here.  And for all the well-wishing in the song, there remains a sense of journeying into the unknown where there will be troubles (hopefully less) mixed with the blessings (hopefully more), that the wind will blow and that friends will be needed. 

As the kids step away from school today, they won’t stop learning.  None of us will.  Yet, despite the work of teachers, parents, and peers, some lessons must be learned alone.  Here are some of the things I want (and try) to teach my kids, but that I know they have to learn on their own.

• Everything is a choice.  Every choice has a consequence.  Whether you do a thing or leave it undone, you will have to live with the result.
• Use your words.  When you speak from your heart, it has a greater impact than you can possibly realize.
• People who are “mean” are often hurting.  Sometimes if you can find their hurt, they can no longer hurt you.
• Someday you will be most grateful for the teacher you complain about most today.
• Don’t be so quick to brush off that kid who annoys the crap out of you.  You two may someday have more in common than you will with the person who is your “best friend” today.
• The “weirdoes” often become the most interesting adults.
• Everyone has pieces that connect – the punk and the cheerleader, the cowboy and the Goth, the bookworm and the skater – underneath the clothes, hair, and accessories, we have common stories, pains, and desires.  (The Breakfast Club should be mandatory viewing for all 14 year olds.)
• No one can fix your argument with your friend – no one but the two of you.
• Yes, you’re right.  You absolutely will not remember that homework assignment 20 years from now.  However, the discipline muscles that you trained in completing it well and on time will support you throughout your life.
• Yes, you’re right again.  It’s not fair.  Life is neither fair nor easy, but it’s that way for everyone.  So, do you think maybe that means it really is fair after all?
• When someone rejects you or says something cruel, they aren’t exposing your shortcomings, they are revealing their own insecurities or capacities.
• Sometimes you get the most out of the lessons or activities that “suck.”
• Yes, pushups really are important.
• You don’t know yet who you are or what you really like.  You won’t know for years, if ever.  So try everything and learn what you can from it before rejecting it.
• You are your only reliable mirror.  No one else can show you your true self.  Not your classmates, your teachers, your siblings, not even your dad and me.
• You don’t find yourself when you are doing the safe, easy things that you know well.  You find out who you are when things are hard, scary, or just plain crappy.
• The only feet you can stand on and still balance are your own.

Putting on Your Game Face

When things get tough or scary, it’s easy to forget what we are doing, and even why.  It’s pretty simple to say “Why bother?  This is just too hard,” and, in my case at least, then go eat something loaded with sugar, butter, flour, and chocolate.  It’s easier to turn on the TV, surf the internet, to read a book, or to just goof off than it is to really work at getting past the uncomfortable stuff.

I’ve said it before.  When I really need lessons, (ok, so that’s most of the time) all I have to do is look at my kids and their peers.

Last night was the school’s Spring Strings’ Concert.  In the Winter Concert, all grades (2-8) perform something.  The venue is larger, the focus is dispersed across the student body, and the pieces played are typically familiar and cozy. 

Everything grows in the spring: plants, kids, and musicianship. For the Spring Concert, the kids have to step up.  Only the strings players in grades 4-8 perform, the venue is smaller, the pieces are eclectic, and the 8^th graders perform their solos.  And, the audience is a bit more critical; parents and grandparents have learned to expect significant growth between winter and spring, and I think the kids realize it. 

Change and development occur under pressure, and it’s illustrative for me to watch how these kids respond to that pressure.  As anyone who’s read this blog should know by now, our school is not heavily populated with passive, docile, blindly obedient kids.  I don’t think it is a coincidence that a curriculum that emphasizes active, engaged learning is going to wind up with a population of active, curious, and questioning students. While these traits will probably benefit the kids in the long run, they make preparation for any sort of focused activity such as a play, concert, or game nerve-wracking for the adults involved.  Rehearsals and practices tend to involve a lot of talking, giggling, forgetting (of everything), and general goofing off.  For weeks.  You can almost measure the time until performance by the lines beneath the teacher or coach’s eyes and the set of his or her shoulders.

Yet, if you ask the kids how things are going, the response is typically, “Fine.”  Though, children who are a bit more sensitive to adult aura will generally add that they wish that their classmates would quit goofing around because it’s upsetting the teacher or coach – not because they think it will impact the performance.

The kids know something that the adults forget.  They know the difference between practice and the real thing.  They know that practice is for building the skills they need, for getting a little bit better each time, for failing, and doing it over.  They don’t express it in words, but I think that they know that when the chips are down: when the curtain pulls back, when the whistle blows, when the conductor lifts her bow – they will be ready. 

The kids have learned to play through the pains of learning.  While their approach can be maddening to watch, I can’t help but think that they may have it right.  They know the difference between the small, daily obstacles and failures, and the big moments where results count.  I’ve watched six years of plays, concerts, and games with this school, and I’ve noticed the same thing every time.  No matter how wound up and scattered they seem right before the performance starts, regardless of the running, shoving, joking, clowning around, as soon as they take their places on the field of battle, whether it be stage or court, something changes.

The kids put on their game faces.  The most distractable, goofy, chatterbox of a class clown will metamorphose as soon as he or she picks up a bow, takes a mark on stage, or gets in position for the tip off.  At the beginning of this year, we spent most of our Saturdays in a gymnasium in Fair Oaks, watching basketball.  During Friday’s concert, I recognized the expressions on several of the girls’ faces as they took up their instruments.  Even though their hands held bows instead of a ball, their expression said the same thing.  “Ok, it’s game-on.  I’m taking this to the net, and nothing is getting in my way.”

As adults, we sometimes lose track of the fact that one can have fun and even make mistakes while still holding an underlying seriousness of purpose.  We get so caught up in our small failures, that we forget how to put on our game faces when it really counts.  I wonder sometimes if this is an area where we need to quit trying to teach our children and instead to listen to them.  Does giving yourself an ulcer during preparations or berating yourself for moments of weakness or failure to make the right choice (every single time) really contribute to the end result?  Do stress and anxiety actually indicate greater meaning and purpose, or do they just prevent us from seeing the fun in the process?

I don’t know the answer, but I wonder.  What would happen if we learned to shrug off the smaller failures, to go play, and to come back with our game faces on, saying to ourselves, “This is what I’m going to do.  Nothing is going to get in my way.”

 

 

Gift of the Small Things

I’ve managed to banish false modesty just far enough to admit that I am possessed of at least my fair share of creative gifts.  I can write, paint, draw (sometimes), cook, and sew.  However, at least two major creative arts lie outside my sphere.  I’ve long since come to terms with my lack of musical ability.  I appreciate music, I can play the notes on the page (on one instrument – the flute), but I lack the ear, voice, and vision to create from music.  As much as I regret my singing voice, I’ve learned to accept that in music, I get to be the audience.  Others create.  Photography, however, is another matter entirely.

Photography is a visual art.  It should be right up my alley.  Ah, yes, we’ll get back to the dreaded “should” in a bit.  Yet, as I’m sure readers of this blog have realized, while I can paint pictures with brush and with word, the simple act of framing the moment I see in a lens and pushing a button is beyond me.  No matter what I see with my eyes and appreciate with my heart about a scene, my photos rarely, if ever do it justice.  They never seem to penetrate the depths of the moment.  All of the elements are there, but something is missing.  In writing, one of the rules is “show, don’t tell.”  My photos tell.

Now, I have several friends and family members who are gifted photographers – some to the extent of professionalism.  But, one friend’s pictures make me downright jealous.  Her blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed are filled with beautiful, arty photos that capture the joy and delicacy inherent in the details of a scene or the small moments of life.  “This is what life is supposed to be,” her photos say as they trace the sunset-colored veining of a dragonfly’s wing or tease the impish glee from a child’s glowing smile.

‘Well, crap,’ I think, looking at her latest posts. ‘We’re good friends; our kids play together; we live less than two miles from each other.  How come my life doesn’t look like that?”  As I scan through sparkling shots of kayaks on open water, cherubic faces of happy children, and glowing, velvet, layers of color, I think of my bathroom sink, smeared with streaks of my makeup and flecks of my husband’s beard.  I focus on the slime growing in the container that I’m pretending isn’t in the back of my refrigerator, the piles of laundry – clean and dirty – taking over my bedroom floor.  I hear two of my three cherubic children screaming at each other in the backyard and keep my ears peeled for the sounds of violence or the stray obscenity.

Now, I know Robyn well enough to know that her life isn’t completely captured in her photos either.  I know her well enough to know her own struggles, lapses, and untidinesses.  In fact, those are the things that I like best about her.  Her openness about not only the triumphs and joys, but also the frustrations and failures, of her own life make me more willing to be real myself.

Yesterday morning was one of those glorious spring days that isn’t pastel-perfect but is instead layered with the exact proportions of shadow and light to fill one’s heart with a sense of miracle.  I ran just over 2.5 miles of my 3 mile loop, allowing myself a cool-down walk through the nature trail at the back of our local park.   I thought of my iPhone in my pocket and contemplated taking pictures, but I had just been looking and some of Robyn’s photos and knew how much the inadequacies of my own pictures would frustrate me.  ‘I wish I were like her,’ I thought, resting my hand on the trunk of a tree and studying the contrast between the umber edges of the bark and its silvery surface.  I closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my back, as my hand rested against the solidity of the tree, and was reminded of the warmth and solidity of my husband.  I walked a few feet further, picked a sprig of rosemary from a bush bursting with purple flowers, and brought the sprig to my nose, thinking of Sierra bringing me rosemary bouquets.  The willow beneath which Aidan and I gathered branches last year for his shelter-project had filled out with delicate, green leaves.  I touched the petals of a rock-rose, and my mind walked through my parents’ garden.  Strands of horse-tail reminded me of long ago trail rides, and the brief moments of respite before remounting my unreliable, bucking, yet beloved mare.  Flowers popped from a tree, and I wanted to show them to Caitlin, far away from me on her own adventure this week.

As I passed through the tunnel beneath the road, I realized that I had been taking photos in my own way.  Capturing the pearls of white-flowered fairy rings nestling in the darker blades of grass, framing a twisted palm frond glowing in the sun against the black asphalt of the street, picking the highlights off of a stick, fallen onto the bark mulch beneath a redwood.  The gift of my friend’s photos, and the gift I found in myself, is the gift of the small moments.  When we pause to frame and snap those details, we are capturing the essence of our lives.  Think back to the biggest events of your life.  What do you remember, truly?  Do you really feel, deep within you, the entire event or day?  Or do you smell the scent of a grandmother’s perfume, or do you recall the feel of your lover’s cheek beneath your hand, or do you hear a laugh, carried on the wind?

Photo credit: Robyn Beaufoy, 2012

The Parenting Plan -- An Open Letter to My Kids

Parenting, particularly other people’s parenting, is a weird landscape – sort of a swamp infested with landmines, alligators, and the occasional diamond.  Yet, somehow, we can’t stay away.  Parenting is a last uncharted territory – trodden by millions, yet pristine in its wilderness.  And no one has a map.  Maybe that’s the draw.  Perhaps that explains our fascination with everyone else’s parenting journey.  We either hope that they have a map and that we can follow in their footsteps, or that their missteps will validate our paths. 

This past week or so, I’ve passed a few signposts that caused me to question, check my compass, and ultimately set me back on course parenting-wise.

A friend posted this on Facebook:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An article was released discussing the “superiority” of French parenting.

NPR ran a piece on the next move of the so-called “helicopter parents” – parenting the workforce.

An acquaintance mentioned to me that she had chosen to have her children “to take care of me in my old age, but I don’t think that’s going to work out.”

We went to our school’s Open House.

We offered to pay Caitlin to foul at her basketball game.

I ran a half marathon.

 

I’m tempted here to jump into a defense of the “If you get a foul we’ll pay you $2,” strategy, because I know that out there somewhere is a parent waiting for me to step on that alligator, but we’ll get there.

Instead, I think much of this can best be explained by an open letter to my kids:

 

            Hey guys,

It’s Mom.  Yeah, the one who bugs you to:

• Clean your room
• Do your homework
• Play your cello
• Go outside and do something, anything
• Sort your laundry
• Make your lunch
• Make your breakfast

You know, the one who:

• Takes out splinters
• Snuggles you when you’ve had that kind of day, or when you just want to feel small enough to fit safely into someone’s lap
• Lets you hold my ear while you suck your thumb
• Always has ginger chews on long car rides
• Reads “The Monster at the End of the Book” in a Grover voice
• Climbs trees and skips – yes, in public

So, here’s the deal.  You owe us nothing.  Your father and I chose to bring you into this world, and we chose to repay our parents by giving you the best upbringing we could.  Our only wish for you is that you go out into the world as adults who do the best you can – for yourself and for others.

We will be here for you always.  And sometimes (you might already have noticed) being here for you means allowing you to screw up, fall down, and figure out a way to get back up again. Sometimes it means encouraging you to take chances or (yeah, I know you think it’s weird) even break the rules. Sometimes it means doing the things that we don’t want to do, the things that are hard for us or scare us, because we know that you are watching.  Yes, you help make us better people too.

Sometimes being there for you means challenging you to do more – to do better than what you thought your best was.  Sometimes it means making you rewrite that paragraph until you want to shove it down my throat.  Sometimes it means making you work the math problems until you want to stab Dad with the pencil. Trust me; it’s not fun for us either.  Until it works.

When I watch you guys cope with disappointment, figure out how to solve a problem or fix a broken toy or project on your own, or work out conflicts with each other or your friends, then it’s worth it – it’s worth all of the tears, the red-faced tantrums, the ‘I-hate-yous,’ and the empty place in my heart that comes from seeing one of you hurt, even for a second.

When you talk to us about the stuff that embarrasses, confuses, or hurts you, then it’s all worth it.

I know we can’t help sometimes.  Sometimes all we can do is watch you stumble around through a problem, watch you hurt, watch you feel lost and lonely, and all we have to offer is the cold solace of an insufficient hug.  I know you think at those times that we have no idea what you’re feeling, that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be kids, that if we really loved you, we would fix everything that is hard for you.

I’m sorry.

I remember.  I remember the loneliness of adolescence.  I remember looking in the mirror and wondering whose face stared back at me.  I remember the lost feeling of my friends running off without me.  I remember losing my best friend – again, and again.  I remember that horrible sense that the entire world was staring at me and whispering behind my back.  I remember hating my parents and family for teasing me – laughing at me.  I remember promising myself that if I ever had kids, they would never have to go through any of that.

I remember.  But, there’s a secret that parents know, that we didn’t learn as kids.  We aren’t all-powerful.  We can’t fix everything.  And, even if we could, we shouldn’t.

Someday, you will get out into a world that holds far more pain than that of your buddies ditching you on the playground.  Someday, you will experience far more loss than a broken toy.  Someday, you will feel a failure far deeper than a bad grade on a test or homework assignment.  And, someday, Dad and I won’t be there to make it better.

Someday you’ll enter a world where you have to work with people you can’t stand.  You’ll have to sit for hours in meetings that make you so bored you want to run screaming around the room, tearing off your clothes.  Someday, someone you love will hurt you in a way that makes every nasty word either of your siblings ever said sound like a compliment.  Someday, you’ll face things so scary that going for the ball in a game or climbing a higher tree will seem like brushing your teeth.  Someday you’ll have to push your mind and body much further and harder than Mr. Wolfe’s mile run.

And, when that someday comes, you’ll be ready.  I know, you don’t think so now.  But, you didn’t think you could ever ride your bike without training wheels either.  Remember how you screamed at us?  How you flung your bike to the ground, shouting that it was stupid and so were we?  Remember how you begged us not to let go of the seat, not even for a second?  How long did that last?  A couple of days?  Now you speed to the end of the block and take your turns so fast that your inside pedal nearly scrapes the asphalt.

Someday you’ll call us to tell us about your new job, about how you got fired, about your girlfriend/boyfriend/engagement/divorce.  Someday you’ll call to say that you’re buying a house, or that our grandchild is struggling in school.  Someday you’ll tell us about the volunteer work you’re doing or your terrifying tax audit.  Someday, you’ll ask for a loan or for a night of babysitting.  And we’ll do our best to be there – our parents have been for us.  But, if we are too far away or unable to help you, you’ll be okay.  It’s all part of the master plan.

Now, about that homework…

Love always and forever, even (especially) when you hate me,

Mom

 

Tasting the Fruits

The last bite of the carrot salad lingers on my tongue – tart and crisp with the yogurt, and brightly sweet with a hidden warmth that spreads from the spoonful of chutney I stirred in.   A final sip of lemon water washes away the salad, and with it goes the tensions of the last month. 

Forgive the food references this morning; I’ve been re-reading M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me after reading an intriguing new biography of Fisher, An Extravagant Hunger by Anne Zimmerman.  My first journey through The Gastronomical Me took place nearly three years ago.  I picked it up in a San Francisco bookstore while alone in the City for a conference.  Fisher’s exploration of her growth and her sensual enjoyment of the world through her experiences with food seemed to perfectly mirror my solitary week exploring the culinary delights of that foggy city.  Just as I dressed in a black skirt and pearl necklace for a four-course dinner alone with my book, delighting as much in watching the people around me as in the feel of pate in my mouth, she wrote of crossing the Atlantic on her own, of solitary meals in France, and of discovering herself through her enjoyment of food.  The quote in the book’s preface spoke to me at a time when I felt that I was at last reaching an understanding of my adult self.  “To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.” –Santayana

That was not my first business trip alone, and I had been an adult for two decades, but for whatever reason, that was the week that I first began to ‘take the measure of [my] powers.’  It was one of the first times that I saw myself as directing my own life rather than living for the approval and pleasure of others. 

This most recent encounter with M.F.K. Fisher comes at the end of a couple of months in which my meals have too often consisted of such staples as: two Bao from Costco, microwaved and eaten over the counter with a handful of cashews and a couple of dates; or a grilled cheese sandwich on white sandwich bread, accompanied by a clump of chips.  My energies have been directed goal-ward with little left for inward maintenance.  Even the things which normally center me have this month gone toward other purposes: painting – auction, decorating – auction and Sierra’s party, writing – money or business building, cooking – sustenance only.

What I hadn’t realized, until Fisher’s loving descriptions of meals, friends, and family once more penetrated the fog of my mind, was that I have been living – and eating – therapeutically rather than preventatively.  I know better, of course.  I know the benefits, to myself, and to those around me, of living with intent, of seeking the foods, people, and activities that will make me feel good, rather than seeking out palliatives once I feel bad.  Instead of taking care of myself, eating light, flavorful meals that will sustain me through the chaos, I have waited until monsters were gnawing at my stomach lining and emotions, and then downed too-large portions of the sweet, salty, and doughy foods that make me ‘feel better.’  Even though I no longer have a job that mandates short nails and tears up my hands, my nails remain unpolished and have scarcely seen a file in 60 days.  The extra glass of wine with dinner tastes good and dulls the stress, but it also packs in the calories and leaves me feeling heavy and slow well into the next morning.

It is past time for me to stop, breathe, and focus on eating the foods and doing the things that help keep me from “feeling bad” in the first place.  It is time to run because it clears my head, centers, and energizes me, not because I want to lose weight.  It is time to prepare even meals I will eat alone lovingly, with consideration for myself and for those I feed.  It is time to be aware of, and to take pleasure in, each bite, and to stop when the bites become automatic or the food tastes of sawdust.  It is time to take moments in the day to breathe, to focus on my place in the world, and to give myself enough respite during the day so that I don’t reach the end wrung out, capable only of flopping into a pool of Jello on the couch.  As life presses me with new challenges, it is time to embrace the biggest challenge of all – to live.

20 Minutes (give or take)

The other day, Sunset Magazine posed the following question on Facebook: “What past Sunset article would you most like to make a reality, regardless of cost?”  After reading, and agreeing with, some of the comments: ‘backyard retreat,’ ‘Airstream trailer,’ ‘Maui,’ I realized that my family and I are living a Sunset article, ironically because of cost.

In October, 2009 – about the time we started to struggle with making our house payments – Sunset published an article on “The 20 Minute Life.”  The article envisioned a life in which everything the family needed: work, school, play, food, entertainment was accessible within 20 minutes.  At the time, it felt as though my favorite magazine was taunting me.  The only things accessible within 20 minutes of our home were Granzella’s pizza to the north in Williams, and my mother-in-law’s house to the south in Dunnigan.  The kid’s school was 40 miles from home.  Mike had a 30 mile commute to work.  The only benefit to my 75 mile commute was the NPR time.  We drove a minimum of 30 miles to go to the grocery store, to see friends, or to see a movie.  Our cars devoured gasoline and sheltered fossilized French fries under the seats.  Getting the kids home from school before 5pm became a special treat.  When on call for work, I stayed with friends; some weeks, I spent more time in their living room than my own.  As though the Sunset editors wanted to drive the knife a bit deeper, the town highlighted in the article was Davis, CA – the town I had loved, and left after graduation, the town that housed my kids’ school and many of our friends.

For us, in the fall of 2009, Davis was a dream – the place we drove to see a movie, to wander the fantasy land of the Farmer’s market, the location of my favorite grocery store.  Yet, here was Sunset, featuring a family living my life – biking their kids to school, spending lazy evenings listening to music in the Central Park while eating food from the Farmer’s market stands.  These people didn’t have over 200,000 miles on both of their vehicles.  Their shoulder seams weren’t frayed from the erosion of the seat belt.  They probably even had time to sweep their kitchen floor.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know the rest.  I’ve written about the loss of our home here, and here, and here.  But a year changes many things.  Our living quarters and budget are tight – the financial bogeys that drove us here aren’t ducking back into the closet anytime soon.  Yet, small though our rental house may be, we inhabit it; it doesn’t possess us.  Each child has his or her own – albeit cozy – room.  The oven works, and even though the rental agency isn’t speedy with the maintenance, repairs are no longer our burden.  At least until the rains begin, the kids aren’t complaining about their smaller bedrooms.  Aidan and Sierra spend most of their time outside – in the backyard, on the swing that dangles from the tree in the front yard, at the park, or rampaging with the neighbor kids.  Caitlin has a desk (that she can find!) in her own room, and her bed runs the length of the window providing her perfect reading nook.  We have biked to the Farmer’s Market without whining or automotive encounter.  Caitlin has biked to school twice – losing her way once and scaring the crap out of her mother.  Her response that afternoon, “well, at least now I won’t get lost again…”

And the playdates, my God, the playdates!  In our old home, with the exception of birthday parties, my kids hosted friends perhaps three times in six years.  In the six weeks we have lived in Davis, school friends have visited at least 14 times, and Caitlin and Aidan have both spent afternoons and nights with friends.  This morning, I have a nine o’clock meeting at Sierra’s kindergarten.  I don’t need to leave the house at eight, or even eight thirty.  Eight forty-five will be just fine.  Update:  I did leave at 8:30, but I was able to ride my bike.  Take that, Ham-and-Cheese Croissant!

Ours isn’t a perfect 20 minute life.  I still commute about 35 miles to work, but a 30-40 minute drive beats 60-90 anytime.  Though, I did miss the end of “Marketplace” last night…

Beauty, Grace, and Style

Purpose filled each countenance as they marched from the amphitheater, banners of their respective city-states floating jewels in the spring sun.  Sparta, Athens, Corinth, Delphi, and
Thebes:  each citizen knew why he or she had come – to participate, to offer one’s best effort to the gods.  The discus offered on an outstretched hand to the sky, javelin pointed toward the heavens, the intricate dance in the wrestler’s circle, the perfect form of a runner, the attempt at flight in the long jump: the elements of the pentathlon were as much art as sport, offerings of the best efforts of humanity.

Once upon a time, in an almost mythic past, athletics were art – examples of beauty, grace, and style offered to one’s deity of choice rather than efforts of extremism offered to the almighty dollar.  Considering that, with weekly examples of athletes behaving badly rampaging through the media, even the notion of sportsmanship seems quaint, it may be laughably naïve to plead a return to a standard of art in athletics.  Yet, our societal impulses regarding competition seem in dire need of an overhaul.  At one end of the spectrum, we have athletes justifying the use of illegal drugs because superhuman feats of strength and speed are expected of them.  Somehow, public demand for spectacle trumps ethics.  On this side, too, lies the hypercompetitive, cutthroat realm of youth sports.  We’ve all heard the horror stories: high-schoolers (or is it down to junior high now?) doping with steroids or cheating on exams to maintain eligibility, parents screaming abuse at coaches, referees, and kids, fights between adults on Little League playing fields.  At the opposite pole, we have trophies for 10^th place, medals for “participation”, elaborate graduations from pre-school and kindergarten, certificates for “best smile.”

What lessons are being taught to our future adults?  From my perspective, it seems that kids learn that money, power, and glory belong only to the strong, fast, and sneaky, and that for the rest of us, just showing up is good enough.  I’ll grant that some of the ideals of the ancient inhabitants of the Hellenic peninsula were less than, well, ideal.  Abandoning one’s infant to the elements for physical weakness has to be the ultimate example of horrific jock parenting.  But, bear with me for a minute, the point will come.

 Now, go back to the first paragraph, return to the sunlit hills and ancient oaks and pines.  Look closely at the athletes marching behind the banners of their city-states.  The faces are still slightly round, features not fully formed, faint hints of what they will become; most of the bodies are under 5 feet tall, some are lanky and awkward, some delicate and lithe, some plump.  None of the bodies are draped in linen, nor, for that matter, nude.  Jewel toned T-shirts are the uniforms donned by these warriors, these proud Hellenes-for-a-day.  Welcome to the Waldorf Schools Pentathlon for Northern California.

In the Waldorf curriculum, fifth grade academics focus on ancient civilizations.  Beginning in Mesopotamia, the children journey over the year throughout India, Persia, Egypt, and conclude their expedition in ancient Greece.  This journey trains the body even as the mind learns.  Games class in fifth grade is devoted to pentathlon training.  At Davis Waldorf School, our much-beloved games teacher Brian Wolfe worked tirelessly and thoroughly with the fifth grade, teaching them technique and form for each event, training their muscles and minds.  This coaching was thorough to the point that when Caitlin came home the afternoon prior to the event, she very seriously informed about her nutritional needs for the evening.  My daughter, who normally guards all school-related information with CIA approved security, went on to tell me exactly where they were going to go once they arrived at the host school in the morning, and what would happen at each point during the day.

In the Waldorf pentathlon, the children are assigned to city-states based on temperament.  Thus competitive kids compete against those of like mind, the more mellow against their peers.  The maternal cameras instinctively picked the kids from “our class” out of the T-shirted multitudes of each city-state.  On each of the familiar faces that day, I saw the same expression of resolve.  These kids were here to participate, and each intended to give it his or her best.  Watching one of Caitlin’s often flighty classmates take her position for the discus, I stopped mid-sentence, mid-breath.  Holding her disc aloft, the girl dropped to one knee in a position taken straight from Greek art.  “She’s beautiful; she could be on an urn,” I whispered to her mother.

“I know;she told me, ‘Mom, I know I’m not going to throw it the farthest, so I’m going to go for beauty, grace, and style.’”  That was the effort that each of our kids showed that day.  They may not have all been the fastest, the strongest, or the biggest, but they all went for beauty, grace, and style.  These attributes manifested in the perfectly positioned arms and upright heads of the runners, in the angle of the javelins, the extension of arm with disc, and they showed in smaller things, things unrelated to technique.  Beauty, grace, and style were present when one of Caitlin’s classmates fell at the beginning of his long race.  Not tripped, fell.  Total face plant.  Grace, you ask.  Yes.  Grace when he regained his footing and ran, catching all but the first two runners by the finish, though all had at least a 50 yard lead.  Beauty, grace, and style were shown by a boy, from another school, who stopped during his race to check a fallen runner.  Beauty grace and style came to the fore as the kids cheered each other on and wrapped consoling arms around the shoulders of those whose muscles had failed them.  I saw nothing but beauty, grace, and extraordinary style as I watched Caitlin run her quarter mile with perfect form, dead last, but never once faltering in her effort to catch the runners in front.

When the laurels were awarded to each city-state, wreaths were bestowed for first, second, and third place in each event, and two wreaths were given for beauty, grace, and style in that event.  From DWS, some of our kids placed in some events, some won laurels for beauty, grace, and style, but all of them left the temple of the gods standing straighter, shining in the sun, and knowing that they had accomplished what they came for.  For them, the winners were not only the big, strong and fast, and just showing up wasn’t nearly good enough.  They strived to please the gods.

Side note:  As a proud mom, I have to mention that Caitlin received a laurel for beauty, grace, and style in the 40 yard dash. 

Runners, Pipers, and Tambourines

Bagpipes as a Zen moment?  What can I say?  I’m Scottish. 

The soft skirl of the pipes drifted around the corner of the hillside.  The first hill had been a pain.  The incline did not challenge my body, but my patience had been sorely tried.  Foolishly, I had begun the race in the group with the posted pace for a 10 minute mile.  I knew I could keep the pace for at least 3 miles, though I was uncertain about the entire 6.  As a road race newbie, I hadn’t realized that this group would also include every person who planned to run at least a little.  A block or so past the start, the crush had thinned a bit, and my feet had found a rhythm.  Just as I began to feel that maybe this crazy endeavor was doable, the mob screeched to a halt.  Like gawkers at an accident scene, the masses ahead had hit the first hill and apparently said to themselves, “Oh, this is too steep.  Maybe I’ll just walk this one.”

Needless to say, by the time I crested the hill, I was ready to bite someone.  Then the moment arrived.  The first notes wafted down just as I heard someone say, “Bagpipes?  Really?”

Yes, really.  Silhouetted on an emerald knoll, a group of kilt-clad pipers played against the mist.  Perfect.  Wrong tartan, but that was forgivable.  My grandfather was a McIntosh.  The clan motto is “Touch not the cat bot a glove.”  Basically, mess with us at your peril.  A stretch of asphalt opened before me and my feet found their cadence.

Back in May as I descended from the endorphin rush of my first 5K race, the 6 mile Wharf  to Wharf (Santa Cruz to Capitola) seemed quite reasonable.  ‘Two and a half months to train.  No problem.’  Therein lays the danger of accomplishment.  The human brain is never satisfied.  I caught myself yesterday afternoon seriously contemplating a brochure for a half-marathon in October.  Endorphins are insidious creatures.  What I had failed to foresee in the balm of May was the effect of summer on my will to exercise, or really on my will to do anything.  My physiology functions best from 65-80 F.  I had also been unable to predict the case of shingles that made the notion of a sports bra unbearable for a full week before the race.  Yet, here I was.  6 miles.  The brochure stated quite sternly that runners must keep to a 15 minute/mile pace and that the course would be closed within 90 minutes.  I envisioned myself dragging at the rear of a pack of thousands, calling my husband for a ride somewhere around mile 3, the pointing and mocking onlookers.  I was dragged to the starting line by two factors.  I had told the children that the weekend camping trip was so that mommy could run a race, and I didn’t want them to see me backing out of a goal.  Also, my mother had told me that I should rest the shingles and scratch the race.  39 years, and my mother still hasn’t learned that the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I shouldn’t.  Sorry mom.

Another hill, another corner.  Passing a folk guitarist, a glimpse of the sea.  A Kiss tribute band played on my left, my feet grinned.  Pulling up a long slope I saw my favorite group of the run.  10-15 tie-dye clad musicians lined up behind a sign that read “Sons of the Beach.”  As I passed, a tambourine and soap bubble infused version of “Rawhide” followed me.  Ah, Santa Cruz.

Balloon arches marked each mile.  The first split time depressed me so badly that my feet almost halted there and then.  ‘19minutes, seriously??’  I told my feet that we had started at least 5minutes back and had been held up in traffic.  ‘Get with it.’  The legs heard and obeyed.  The second mile took just over 10 minutes.  At each rainbow arch, my body responded to the called time as to a challenge.  With each mile my pace increased. 

Onlookers lined the roadway.  Far from the jeering phantoms of my insecure imaginings, these people projected lifesaving goodwill.  Generous with their cheers and encouragement, they gave the impression that each of us had our own personal pep squad.  Some held out hoses or sprinklers for those of us longing for a shower.  One lovely man offered a tray of strawberries and orange segments.  The crisp sweetness of that kind orange carried me a full mile.  One mother and her two children held out their hands to ‘high five’ each of us as we passed.  Just past a percussion group, a lone man stood and banged with a mallet on the back of a skillet which rang sweetly across a slough. 

‘Come on,’ called Capitola.  ‘Come see me again.’ 

‘You can do it,’ Santa Cruz pushed me from behind.  ‘You started here.’

Start there, I did.  Certain places weave in and out of our lives like thin gold threads.  From early trips to the beach and Boardwalk with our grandparents through my college years and into those of my sister, Santa Cruz and Capitola have flickered in and out of my life.  Indirectly, my current adult life has its roots along that bay.  Had I missed a party in Santa Cruz 20 years ago, I would not have met my husband 5 years later.  Strange but true.  After all, it is all Dave’s fault.

Saturday had been spent dragging the kids from one old haunt to the next.  Plugging up the hill to the UC Santa Cruz campus, I demanded of the backseat, “Do you want to see where Aunt Steph went to college?”

As we entered the grounds, their enthusiasm turned to confusion.  “Where’s the college?”  “This is it.”  “This doesn’t look like a school; it looks like a forest.”  I grinned to hear them echo my first impressions.  20 years ago, my roommate and I circled the campus endlessly ‘looking for the college.’  It had seemed impossible that the random collection of buildings that sporadically dotted the forest was indeed a university.

Our next stop was Natural Bridges State Beach.  Flashes of the essence of Santa Cruz drifted past:  surfers floating like black seals on the waves, the requisite amateur-painted VW van, the skateboarder towed by a large, enthusiastic dog, the smells of brine, kelp, fog, and fish.  On the beach, the kids caught a connection to home.  “Come on, Aidan.”  Caitlin dragged her brother to a specific vantage point along the shore.  “Look!  See it?  See the rock; it’s the one from the painting.”  They knew the story, knew that mom had painted the scene in oils from a photograph sent by a college friend.  However, this was the first time they realized that mom painted actual places, and that they were visiting a place that had hung on the living room wall longer than their own lives.  Ghosts of my past walked the sands where my children frolicked.  Past and future joined near a crashing, grey surf beneath the spiraling wings of pelicans.

As we parked near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a more distant past floated through my memory.  The Boardwalk rang with the excitement of childhood.  Screams and laughter danced above the rumble of surf and roar of rollercoasters.  Grease, salt spray, and tanning lotion ran under the sweetness of cotton candy.  Clutching the hands of my children, I became the child.  My grandparents appeared at every corner.  Glancing at the waves, I heard my grandmother’s mantra as my sister and I ran toward the surf, “Don’t go in past your knees!”  We stopped for lunch and my husband’s jaw dropped as his calorie-conscious wife ordered deep-fried artichoke hearts and a linguica sandwich with grilled onions.  As the crisp grease and metallic artichoke melted onto my tongue, my grandfather’s grin appeared.  My children had a bag of plastic sand toys wedged under the table; the cups of neighboring beer drinkers evoked the memory of hops-scented sand castles.  Grandpa had always saved his beer cup for us to use as a sandcastle mold.  The first tower or two smelled faintly of beer and the paper had a tendency to disintegrate after a couple of trips to the ocean for water, but it was a tradition.  As we draped our bright beach towels over our patch of pillowy sand, I felt the rough edge of brown and white striped terry-cloth.  Grandma line-dried her laundry, and her towels had all of the pliability of coarse-grain sandpaper.  As we emerged from the waves, sunburned, salt-scoured, and sand-crusted, Steph and I stood with meek trepidation as Grandma rubbed us down with the agonizing vigor of love.  We were well into our teens before we managed to convince her that a) we could towel ourselves, and b) that we would really rather not change out of our bathing suits in the middle of the beach with only a towel tented around us.  I resisted the temptation to similarly torture my children.

On the beach, the kids proved themselves as individual as their nicknames – neither clones of each other, nor of my childhood.  Sierra, our “marmot” played happily on the sand, shunning the waves, like a good little land mammal.  Aidan, the “alligator” was happiest in the shallows.  An overly strong wave would cause him to tug at my hand with shouts of “Back!  Back!”  And Caitlin?  Caitlin stood as far into the surf as I would permit.  Two or more weak waves caused her to raise an eyebrow at the sea and ask sardonically, “C’mon, Poseidon.  Is that all you’ve got?”  (She’s re-reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.) “Do you really think it’s a good idea to taunt Poseidon while we’re standing in the ocean?”  “Moommm, I’m an otter.  I’m a creature of the sea.”  And so she is.

Aidan’s hand tucked into mine as we stood in line for the Giant Dipper, reminding me of the mingled excitement and guilt as I held Grandpa’s hand in the same line 30 years ago.  The thrill of riding a “really big, grownup rollercoaster” tangled with the fear that Grandma was right.  Maybe he really was too old for “those rides.”  What if he did hurt his knees or back or heart?  As Aidan’s face went still as the lap bar engaged, the old fears seized me from behind.  What if he was too young?  He was just barely over the height limit; what if it wasn’t safe for him?  What if he was scared?  I screamed with laughter around the dips and turns darting glances at my son’s white face.  The glory of risk-taking fought for supremacy with my need for a guarantee of security.  There are no guarantees; I abandoned myself to the last swooping turns.

Buckled into the car, the first bite of my caramel apple caught my teeth and dripped down my wrist.  In the back seat, the kids shared a bag of cotton candy.  30 years ago, the traditional treat “for the way home” invariably produced the need for at least one stop in response to my sister’s agonized cries of “I’m stickyyyyyy!”  From the back seat, a voice asked, “Mom, do you have any wet wipes?”  “Nope, they’re all in the back.  Do you want a napkin?”  “No, that’s okay.”

Feet flew the 6^th mile past the coast and into Capitola.  A man with a wig like a giant tribble skin ran on my right; I passed a woman with a tank top that read, “Never tutu old.”  She wore a red lace tutu.  I sprinted down the hill with the long galloping strides of my childhood.  My own children and patient husband waited just beyond the finish as I ran from the past into my future.

Pounding the Pavement

            “You can’t run away from trouble.  There ain’t no place that far.”  --Joel Chandler Harris (Disney interpretation.)

Thirty years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with Uncle Remus.  An ill-fated attempt at the 880 in fourth-grade track had given me to believe that running was its own brand of trouble.   Sore shins, aching legs, burning lungs, a stitch in the side – who needed it?

            Now, running ties me to an immediacy where my troubles have no place.  The tension over scheduling, the school form that I’m sure is somewhere on the kitchen table, the past due bill lurking at the edges of my bank account, the fact that we “never have anything good for breakfast", patients that refuse to improve despite my best efforts, the chapter that is jammed somewhere between my brain and keyboard, the expenditures of time and money on a “hobby” that shows no sign of contributing to the family income or well-being, the urgently needed health-certificate that I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten to sign – these bogeymen have no place in the morning run.  Reality centers in the soles of my shoes as they slap the asphalt, in the brush of my breath against my ribs, in the melting sun like sap against my skin, in the rustle and buzz in the wild oats and yellow-star that line the shoulder, in the smeared carcasses of road-kill rattle snake that give new import to the noise in the brush, in the smell of humid earth and distant horse.  Finances, husband, children, friends, work, words remain at home.  Like the shadow in Stevenson’s poem, they have “stayed at home behind me and [are] fast asleep in bed.”

            On occasion, I invite my life to run with me.   “Come on,” I say.  “You’re welcome to join me, but you have to keep up.”  Some things drop quickly behind, exhausted.  Others keep pace with me, and we jog toward the hills in a sort of uncertain truce.  By the end of the run, I have befriended these thoughts, fears, and uncertainties.  Monsters hold far less terror after 2 or 3 miles.  I think most of their size comes from water-weight.

            In deference to Uncle Remus, I concede that perhaps we can not escape our troubles by running, but I would submit that a little exercise tames them.